This is the film that a French court ordered removed from the internet, if you can imagine such arrogance.

Titled The Wall (Le Mur – Autistes sans frontières) it was made by Sophie Robert, and contains interviews with twenty-seven psychoanalysts. Three of them later sued Robert, saying that the film misrepresented their views, but the fact remains that France continues to deny autism and subjects sufferers to barbaric, mediaeval treatments including freezing.

What makes this topical is the fact that the psychoanalysts all repeat the nonsense promoted earlier this week by Tony Humphreys, the self-proclaimed most influential psychologist in Ireland, confirming for all to see that psychoanalysis is at best a pseudoscience on a par with chiropractic, and at worst a quasi-religion, valuing belief above evidence. Or, as Brian Hughes put it so eloquently, Scientists, to be blunt, don’t give fields like psychoanalysis a second thought.

No, they are not scientists. Psychiatry is meant to be dominated by the medically trained. Psychoanalysis is a useful tool but would, or should, not be the overriding model for psychiatry. Here, in most mental health teams in our hospitals, psychologists would be subordinate to and complement a consultant psychiatrist.

It shows just how powerfully influential and controlling in human endeavours is that basic desire to keep onto what provides our income.
The right or wrong of this argument is set aside for cash and of course it is that basic human desire that brings about the argument in the first place too.
Dilemma or what!
I think it has a bit of the catch-22 going on.

This just came to my attention, and I watched it today, as well as did some additional research. With a new Master’s in Special Education/Teaching Certificate, and the mother of a 14 year-old son with autism, I’m utterly appalled! We discarded the Bettleheim theories many decades ago…as mentioned…and that history was chronicled in the 10 or so year old U.S. documentary “Refrigerator Mothers”…a very sad tale. These so-called professionals, the psychoanalysts, have taken the impossibly unsupportable Bettlheim beliefs and infused Freudian philosophy…quite simply unbelievable in the face of all that is known today and fully available to them. They should face prosecution for misrepresenting treatment and doing nothing but harm. Their interviews would be laughable if not for the reality of the damage they do. Thank you for posting this, your insightful and informed comments, and helping to expose this story!